The Blog

Pisa Italy

We purchased the car rental through a website called rentalcars.com – we didn’t know the provider when we booked – oh we wish had.

Firstly started off by having wait for over an hour to get to the desk.

This should have been an indication of problems to come as we could hear people complaining about everything from being charge €20 per baby seat to having to pay €1500 euro’s on a debit card as a deposit.

When we reached the front of the line. our process started.

Would you like to purchase our insurance €160?

no, we have our own excess insurance (which we had purchased from rentalcars.com)

well if you don’t take it we will need €1200 as a deposit and if you have any damage then it will be a minimum charge of €300 for each piece of damage.

This process when on for about 40 minutes with the lady trying to explain how we would be charged and why not taking the insurance was going to cost us more money and if we didn’t take the insurance we would have to wait when we returned the car for someone to look over the car and we should get to the airport 4 hours early because they can be busy!

eventually i paid the money on a debit card as they wouldn’t accept any of my credit cards.

Total payment €69.42 for a full tank of petrol (35 liter tank!)

deposit €991.74

Tax on deposit €222.84

from arriving at the rental car place to driving out the process took 2 hours.

The car a fiat 500 was fine – reasonable condition etc.

The problems started when taking the car back.

Another hour waiting for someone to look over the car, just like the lady said. I’d read a couple of things online when we had arrived at the hotel about gold car so i ended up videoing the guy walking around the car.

The money finally hit my bank account 16 days after coming back from holiday. A grand total of £920.

Naturally i complained about this. through the gold car website – I got an email back 4 days later.

I then reread the contract.

Apparently i had agreed to the payment of the deposit in a currency of my choice (no such choice was given) this was charged at a 2% commission rate.

Even though i had left the car 70% full of fuel (we had only driven the car 150km) we had be charged the full amount.

They don’t return the tax – I’m not sure if this is legal but they charge a sales tax on the deposit which is normally returned because a sale tax isn’t due on a refund. e.g. if you take something back to tesco they don’t keep the VAT

I’m just left with the feeling that they will rip people off in the best way possible.

overall if your thinking of using this company i would suggest you get your head examined! don’t go near them